How Poetry Comes to Me

Much like poetry, living comes to each of us and it blunders along just out of view from us. It is like sitting around a campfire and knowing there is something outside the ring of light the fire casts.

Within the ring of light, there is a warmth, perhaps a certainty. We think we know what is happening next. In truth, the living happens just outside our reach. Wendell Berry describes it as happening, but, once it happens, we cannot be fully describe it.

Gary Snyder wrote about his poetry writing as having to go meet the poetry just outside the range of his campfire. When we are attentive and mindful of each moment and what is just beyond our reach and vision, life dances at the edge of the light, like poetry.

Instead of certain answers, we encounter questions that cannot be fully answered, but help form the conversation and poetry that is our living.

About ivonprefontaine

I completed a PhD at Gonzaga University in Spokane, WA. Previously, I taught for 20 years and spent the last 14 years teaching in an incrediable hybrid school setting. My dissertation topic and research were how teachers experience becoming who teachers, as human subjects. For me, teaching is a calling and vocation that allows me to express who I am as a person. Currently, I am waiting and listening to what will call me. We have begun a small consulting and leadership firm called Rocky River Leadership & Consulting Ltd.

I have a difficult time with writing poetry. I have written only one, true, decent poem in my life, and I had to mess with it for years to get it to be okay.
However, recently I’ve been composing little Haikus. Seems like I can sort of handle those!

It’s pioneering in the best sense: opening pathways between the conscious and the unconscious domains, providing signposts for those who would follow. I find myself resonating somewhere inside to this campfire image, Ivan, and to the poem you have created.

For me it doesn’t blunder but dances quietly around me in a spiritual realm. I have to be very still to hear the silent voice that wants to be spoken. It’s a new experience. I just started writing poetry seriously this last year in my 60s.